October Fog

by Jonathan Shipley

“The fog comes on little cat feet,” begins Carl Sandburg’s poem. He wrote it in 1916, overlooking Chicago’s harbor on Lake Michigan.

Fog, and time: a cat that is cunning, silent, deliberate.

As I walk in the fog across Cherokee Marsh, I can’t help thinking about time and changing seasons and the mysteriousness of life and, ultimately, death.

October is my birth month. Like a fog creeping in, I have aged. It seemed imperceptible, until it wasn’t at all. I need bifocals to properly see the marsh’s drooping sunflowers better. I need hearing aids to better hear the wood ducks on the Yahara and the Henslow’s sparrow in the tall grass. I need to walk more deliberately on these paths—through the oak groves, along the ponds—lest I fall and hurt myself.

I was a kid once. I am no longer. I am in the autumn of my life. My kids in their spring.

And this October fog that envelopes all is bewildering and beautiful.

In Celtic traditions, fog appears in tales of fairy crossings. Fog descends in enchanted forests. There is a pathway through the murk to other worlds.

Every moment, every step (even here at the marsh, as some sandhill cranes squawk and lift themselves up into floating origami across the expanse) I know is one step closer to the grave and one step further away from the cradle. Unless one is born at death?

In the Chinese Taoist tradition, fog is a boundary between the earthly and the divine.

I am not divine. My children are. My wife is. These marsh flowers withering in season, they are reaching for divinity by falling back into the earth. I am merely a human, not knowing lies ahead. I’ve never known. I never will. I just keep walking in the fog.

There’s radiation fog, ground fog, advection fog. There’s frontal fog, hail fog, freezing fog. There’s upslope fog and valley fog and sea fog.

And, there, one can barely make him out in the mist, Edgar Allan Poe writing “The Masque of the Red Death.” There’s Coleridge writing “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” There’s J.M.W. Turner painting over the Thames. There’s Whistler painting over Battersea Bridge. And there’s Sandburg, peering out his window at Lake Michigan, thinking about cats, and time, and transcendence, and the ephemeral nature of things. All things.

Me, a thing. The sunflowers on this marsh walk. Those cranes flying into the gloom of who knows. No one knows, yet everyone does know ultimately. One step closer. One step further.

It’s a little thrilling, and a little frightening, fog. I’ve walked this path a hundred times, and yet the fog makes everything a bit of a mystery again. I know where every park bench is. I know where the effigy mounds lie. I know where I might spot red-eyed vireos in the limbs of forest trees. Yet, I stumble upon them again only in this fog. Oh, yes, there you are, old friends.

And I am getting older. Soon it will be winter, and I will be wintered, too. My wrinkles will be deeper. My ears will ring more loudly with tinnitus. My knees will creak. My heart will thump in the irregular ways it does, but thump it will.

There’s still plenty to be bewildered about. There’s still time for stillness. There’s time to watch my children grow into better humans than me. There’s time to kiss my wife (and kiss her again), thanking her for knowing me, and loving her deeply. There’s still time (no one knows how many heartbeats remain) between this earthly place and another place of glittering mystery.

I keep walking in the fog at the marsh before heading back to my family, as a cat sits somewhere on silent haunches and then moves on.